The Dead Letter Department #0

what’s the dead letter department?

I had to get off twitter. I’m not like off-off twitter—if you’re trying to write books that seems like a bad idea, so I didn’t delete my account or give someone else my password the way that famous twitter users sometimes do (dear Nicole Cliffe: I do miss your tweets but the pictures of the baby horses on instagram are also very nice). I still check my personally curated feed which consists of my sister sending only the very best tweets to my DMs, & occasionally I go read everything in my colleagues list, composed of my agent & her other clients who are all very good and smart. But I don’t spend time every day scrolling it, not since the election. I don’t know who the main character of the day is anymore. I have presumably missed several cycles of catastrophic publishing news.

This is not to imply that I have good boundaries around social media—I read every drop of drama in the neighborhood facebook group which is arguably 60% more toxic than three twitters stuffed into a trenchcoat, & I have developed a new fascination with Reddit which can only bode poorly for my brain, but I’ve been looking for something else. Something with a slower moving current that also (crucially) does not require pictures of my face.

I imprinted on livejournal back when all the writers & weirdos I knew were on it. The good shit only happened on locked accounts and there was TONS of drama over who could see what (or who ACCIDENTALLY saw what if someone did not log out appropriately). It was before I really clocked in to the social media grind and seeing people’s opinions & preferences & little rants about things was genuinely thrilling. And I still get a thrill from it! I love lists where people talk about the fancy serum they put on their face, and the special sheets they can only get at the one linen-weaving nunnery or whatever, I love to know what music people listen to on their commutes & the method their grandmother taught them to measure rice. I really miss longer online conversations.

This is partially being just at the end of a cultural phase of letter writers, I think. Maybe they’ll be back at some point; maybe letter writing will suddenly come into vogue & everyone will be buying fancy inks and personalized stationary. It was not uncommon, as I grew up, to write long letters in a quite ordinary way, as part of staying in touch. I moved a lot and went to a lot of schools, so for years I kept up a wide correspondence with friends in all the places I had been before. Getting mail was so cheerful: a small dispatch from another place telling me someone had thought about me for long enough to lick an envelope, long enough to put a little paper rectangle into a big metal box.

And of course there’s the actual dead letter department, long since renamed the much less romantic and unpleasantly plural mail recovery centers. I’ve been obsessed with this idea since I first heard about it: of course the vast and honorable postal service must accumulate truckloads of mail that cannot, no matter how diligently they try, be delivered to the intended recipient, and of course it has to go somewhere. Something of yours is probably in there: a smeared name, a bungled address, and that envelope sent out with such intention has vanished into a fellow-forest of unread mail, lost for good.

Here we are at substack, then: a place for my own dead letters. This is where I’m going to go when I want to say more than fits into the over-burdened text app on my phone, or when I want to tell something to someone who’s not listening anymore. Or just when I want to talk to you.

so what are you going to write about?

Perfume, probably. Things I’m reading, books I’m trying to write and want to talk about, although I’m constantly hamstrung there by my own superstitions around keeping growing things a secret. Some of the stuff I used to talk out with friends on shitty picnic tables on bar patios, back when we could go to bars and see friends. Feelings, as I attempt to have them (spoiler alert: I am bad at this). Recommendations, sometimes, for stuff I think you might like seeing or doing or eating. One good thing, when I can find it. One part public diary, one part essay, and the other part a hot helping of whatever nonsense is churning around in my head.

how often?

Once a week, maybe twice if I get especially talkative.

can I write back?

Please do! There are comments, if you want to click through & leave one, there’s a little heart button you can smash; you can even write to me and tell me things you might want to read frome me! And of course there’s a link at the bottom to subscribe if you haven’t already.

I hope to see you here again.